Air Algerie leased aircraft missing; and would you use Bitcoin?

Algerian aviation authorities have lost contact with Air Algerie flight AH5017 en route from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Algiers. Around 50 minutes after take-off all contact was lost.

Air Algerie leased the aircraft earlier this month from Spanish ACMI firm, Swiftair. The aircraft was an MD-83, reg EC-JUG (msn 49847), according to the Airline Economics 24/7 database. The Algerian national carrier has also wet-leased an A330-300 from AirAsia X and two A340-300s from Hi Fly.

Following on from yesterday’s editorial regarding Chinese airspace, we can confirm that a trusted contact of a reader (our thanks to him) notes that the 26 days of flight delays and cancellations is caused by air force and military exercises, in which it is said that china is conducting its largest ever live fire drills. This information at least gives us confirmation that this is a set timescale and the current problems will not drag on past the set 26 days, however one must surely ask if this is the start of a more regular occurrence of such exercises.

Meanwhile Latvia’s national airline, airBaltic, confirmed this week that it is now accepting bitcoin payments directly. So is airBaltic lighting the way for others or is it taking too much of a risk? The truth is a bit of both. airBaltic could force some of the large online booking agents to accept Bitcoin, which would certainly start an avalanche for the virtual currency use.

But as we are all aware, and as reported here previously, Bitcoin is terribly unstable and as admitted earlier this year by the owners of the currency, it can be hacked. airBaltic is leaving itself open to considerable currency loss. But airBaltic is hedging its bets by slapping a hefty €5.99 transaction fee on Bitcoin transactions, so in the event this move creates good global publicity while also being low risk as many will be deterred from using it.

But the point is this: airBaltic might be starting something that will grow rapidly and then cause significant loss. If the major online booking agents start using Bitcoin en-mass then they are open to losing their shirts. On the flip side of the argument though if passengers are willing to pay €5.99 extra to use Bitcoin then you will know that your usual fares by other payment means need to be increased. This is indeed an interesting experiment to keep an eye on.

Finally, in September 2012 we received information stating that the Hong Kong Airlines A380 order would without question be cancelled. We ran a feature on this and put the same on the cover of issue ten of Airline Economics, the cancellation came through this week and so this is a new lead time record on a story for us. We thank our sources for once again being right on the money.